Nice, optimistic outlook. People have a hard time dealing with exponentials. Yet they are easy to observe when they are happening. This one in particular is fun

Nice, optimistic outlook. People have a hard time dealing with exponentials. Yet they are easy to observe when they are happening. This one in particular is fun. There are a few things worth noting. - Like this article does, rather than talking about installed solar, we need to look at production rates for panels. It's much simpler to estimate and from there to installed capacity is just a matter of the market figuring out the right price levels and the panels being sold and installed. - Why is the growth exponential? The demand for cheap energy far outstrips the supply. Our economies are bottle necked on energy cost and they've always been historically. And energy prices have come down by a lot recently. Every time somebody starts producing solar panels, they pretty much have no trouble selling them. That's not going to be true infinitely but we're nowhere close to having saturated demand for cheap energy. - As production volumes go up, the learning effect drives prices down. People keep on finding new efficiencies and improvements as volumes go up. Everything from production, distribution, installation, operation, etc. is affected by this. New entrepreneurs in this space don't just do what others are doing but they try to do it a little faster. And looking at big markets like the EU and the US, there are plenty of easily observed inefficiencies still resulting from regulations, bureaucracy, and other hurdles. Most of the cost at this point is installation. And most of that is because it requires specialist skills and because there are lots of rules mandating the use of people with those skills. It could be plug and play but isn't just yet. Buy some panels, plug them in, job done. Works like that for your boat. But not your house somehow. Can that be solved? (rhetorical question). - Lower prices grow the market because there are plenty of consumers of expensive energy that would love to pay less. We've long crossed the line where there is any doubt about solar panels earning themselves back under most circumstances. The lower the price, the faster they earn themselves back. The subsidies have helped but they aren't strictly needed for this anymore. And there are plenty of people and companies still paying way too much for their energy. Based on the above, the market is much simpler to predict. Just follow the money: where are countries investing in new production capacity? Express it in GW/year. Add it up. That's the market growth. China is obviously leading and expanding enthusiastically but it's making other countries nervous that are now also investing in their own production capacity. So, we can expect some surge in growth to result from that. And yes, solar panels don't work 24/7 and are affected by weather and seasonal changes. All well known and mostly easy to predict and model. Luckily, we're seeing the same exponential effects in battery and energy storage production. For grid storage, domestic usage, cars, planes, toothbrushes, etc. That number is soon going to be expressed in twh/year produced. 1 twh of battery can translate into hundreds of twh stored and released per year if utilized to the max. But most batteries actually aren't. Most batteries just sit there holding most of their charge for most of the time. It's potential capacity we're barely utilizing. We'll have lots of that soon. Tens/hundreds of thw. The world's annual electricity production is only about 25 pwh (2500 twh). That will grow. But the numbers are starting to add up. We'll need some amounts of other, more expensive sources of energy (wind, nuclear, fusion, etc). But battery plus solar actually go a long way and we're going to have insane amounts of both. Also, existing fossil production capacity won't disappear overnight. Technically that's still growing and might only start shrinking towards the end of this decade. Driven by renewables replacing them and out competing them. The more interesting trend is going to be the nature of that decline. It's going to be another exponential. I.e. much faster than people currently expect/anticipate. In short, people keep under estimating the numbers. Both conservatives and progressives keep getting surprised by this. Even people that should know better (politicians, executives of companies affected by these trends, etc.). It's because people look at the numbers and then assume they won't change much or at least ignore the clearly observable exponentials or assume some linear trend.